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Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Why I Dropped… Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. season 1

Right now, I think the most positive thing I can say about Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is that it shows future showrunners what not to do and how not to do it.

On the surface, the show wasted its potential by not leveraging the strengths of its premise as the intersection of the early Marvel cinematic universe, it’s failed to develop its characters to the point of audience caring (or even vague, base-level audience interest), its villains are boring and ill-defined, its stories are uninspired, and its camera direction is boring.

Beyond any of that, though, and what ultimately undermines the entire show is the feeling that they’re just not trying. It’s not clear whether that’s a result of an enforced editorial hand that limits the show’s story potential to the sidelines (because the important things can only happen in the movies), a genuine feeling in the writer’s room that they just don’t have the talent to do anything good, or some combination of negative factors, but what does come through loud and clear is a lack of ambition. You can always blame clumsy moments or a lack of progressive story structure on inexperienced writers, you can always say that a show has trouble finding itself in its first year, but there is no getting over the fact that the show really seems to be aiming low in almost every aspect.

I don’t think it’s asking or expecting too much to hope that the writers on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. would feel lucky to be where they are, but nothing about what they’ve written would suggest that. These are just creators trudging through the doldrums of a show they don’t seem to want to be on and a weekly schedule they can barely keep up with.